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The research on display here is sober and systematic, introducing in detail what I Punch i was, how it was run, and how China was depicted in its "large cut" cartoons; from what I have seen, a study of its smaller scale imagery would simply reinforce the conclusions established. But it is possible to go further: this book deserves a readership far beyond the academic world of studying China; read this book, and one will readily see the Chinese phrase "A Century of Humiliation" in a completely new light. [Extracted from the article]

Michael Loewe has repeatedly and as recently as 2021 looked at how Confucius appears in Han sources and has drawn attention to his lack of prominence, at least to the degree one might expect. Here, a preliminary assessment of the sources of opposition to Buddhism in one key sixth-century c.e. collection of polemics further demonstrates that adherence to mingjiao 名教 (Teaching of a Good Name) or to lijiao 禮教 (teaching on ritual) appears there as the main identifiers of opponents; rujiao, the term often later translated as "Confucianism," is mentioned but once. While the commitment to values such as filial piety promoted by opponents of Buddhism is clear; their institutional coherence and self-awareness as a group does not seem to have been at all on a par with that of the Buddhist community. That situation did not start to shift until the Tang dynasty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like Xi Jinping, he is keen to stress the difference between Chinese and Indian Buddhism, and from his standpoint is disposed to account for this by positing some influence from Iranian religion (p. 272) during its journey to China. CHO-YUN HSU, translated by DAVID OWNBY Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2021 xxvi + 279 pp. Certainly, the clarity of Hsu's epitome of the Chinese heritage will make this a good choice for introductory college courses, especially since his outlook is not confined to high culture but extends also to the everyday. [Extracted from the article]

Robert Morrison (1782–1834), the first Protestant missionary to China, was responsible for the completion of the earliest Chinese-English Dictionary in 1814. Though this work would not have reached publication without the help of Chinese assistants, and of the printer P. P. Thoms (1790–1855), even so Morrison's scholarly achievements in this and other aspects of Chinese studies were prodigious. This survey of recent research makes clear the continuing value of his writings to contemporary scholars, and also suggests that he was not simply more seriously engaged in attempting to understand China than his contemporaries but also more enlightened than a good number of his successors in missionary work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Comparative writing about the history of science and technology in different cultures tends to assume that differences in the ways in which these cultures write their histories are not important. But this is unlikely to be the case. The comparative lack of historical writing about printing in China by European standards should not in itself lead us to conclude that print only played a minor role there, any more than the tendency to downplay the importance of paper among historians of the European book means that its use in Europe was less significant than in other cultures. That in China the relative balance of the historical record is the opposite of the one that we tend to assume on the basis of the European experience is demonstrated here by contrasting the dearth of information about early printing with the commemoration even of relatively marginal cultural figures through the traditional Chinese historiography of paper making. But only tentative suggestions can be made as to why these differences in historical writing may have occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Traces the way in which the English-language world sustained a description of religion in China. Persistence of a particular paradigm in the understanding of Chinese religion; Jesuit interpretation of Chinese religion in the writings of Matteo Ricci; Description of the three sects in China.

After over a century and a half of increasingly superfluous translations of the Tao-te ching one might be pardoned for thinking that there was no further need for sinologists to devote attention to this text. Nothing could be further from the truth. The publication in 1974 of two manuscripts from the tomb at Ma-wang-tui dating to the early years of the 2nd century B.C., together with some previously unknown works of the same period, constituted as sensational an advance in our knowledge as could possibly be imagined, short of an autograph copy revealing the identity of Lao-tzu himself. Quite apart from answering (and raising) a host of textual questions, these finds have afforded us a startling glimpse of the significance assigned to the Tao-te ching during the early Han. This in turn has served to remind us that the continuous transmission of the text has involved marked discontinuities in the construction placed upon it, discontinuities which Western sinology has in the past been all too remiss in tracing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Western sinologists dealing with texts of any antiquity are usually as aware as their East Asian colleagues of the importance of textual scholarship as the foundation of their studies. Yet despite the considerable sophistication of the techniques developed in the West for editing the texts of our own classical heritage we have until now largely left the collation of Chinese texts to East Asian scholars working on the basis of their indigenous academic traditions, and have generally been content to accept their results even in cases where these are clearly somewhat unsatisfactory. Paul Thompson's magnificent study shows that there is no need to let this situation continue. Taking an ancient work which has been the subject of conspicuous foul play on the part of pre- modern Chinese scholarship, he has produced a book which is in every sense of the word an exemplary demonstration of how the most rigorous techniques of textual and bibliographic analysis should now be applied to problems which have been ignored for too long. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Just supposing that the British Council were able to offer lecture tours by the world's great minds of the past, I am sure that names like Aquinas, Chu Hsi or Dōgen would be able to pack an auditorium even now. But in the pub afterwards we would probably find them less easy company, not quite at home in our own times. Reading Tominaga Nakamoto (1715–46), however, one gets the extraordinary but quite palpable feeling of encountering an intelligence every bit as alert and critical as any product of a modern university education – no doubt precisely because by the standards of his own day he was largely selfeducated. To find the entire surviving slim corpus of the writings of this remarkable genius rendered into English by the head of one of our most respected departments of Religious Studies is gratifying indeed, and one hesitates to qualify praise of such a welcome achievement with a note of criticism, especially when the translation is prefaced by a lengthy introduction giving within a limited compass a more than adequate account of Tominaga's all too brief life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Among the many manuscripts relating to Ch’an Buddhism included in the Tun-huang finds of the early years of this century, the Leng-chia shih-tzu chi has always been regarded by scholars as a discovery of unusual importance, since it presents an unrivalled picture of the early development of this type of Buddhism from the long-obscured viewpoint of the so-called Northern school of Ch’an. The text has been rendered into English lately by J. C. Cleary, but only in a translation intended for a non-scholarly audience. Fortunately, however, the new French-language translation and study by Bernard Faure is everything a scholar could wish for, a worthy product of many years of research, including several spent at the feet of Yanagida Seizan, Japan's outstanding authority on the early historiography of Ch’an. Faure's work, not surprisingly, shows a complete grasp of the complex issues of intellectual history raised by his text, and also provides copious commentary on its author, Ching-chüeh (683–c. 750), and his background. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]